Courtney E. Smith; image courtesy of boston.com
I recently emailed Courtney E. Smith some questions to coincide with the release of her book Record Collecting for Girls, which I reviewed earlier for this site. She was good enough to answer my questions.
You discuss issues of sexism in relation to music fandom and connoisseurship throughout the book and in various interviews to promote it. Why did you write this book and what do you hope to accomplish with it?
I wrote this book because I love reading this kind of book. Be it, outside of music, stuff by Sarah Vowell, David Sedaris, or Sloane Crosley or in music from [Nick] Hornby, [Chuck] Klosterman, and [Rob] Sheffield. But in the realm of music it started to bug me that there weren’t editorial music books from the female point of view. I wanted to know what some of the women portrayed in these books thought, what their side of the story would be, what songs they’d say they listened to. I thought I’d write the kind of conversations I have with girlfriends.
More than anything, I hope it makes people think talking about music can be fun. And that it makes them laugh.
Do you identify as a feminist? If so, how do you define feminism for yourself? Does it inform your book project?
I’ve been a feminist since I was 16 and read an essay in Sassy about it. That inspired me to read Susan Faldui’s Backlash and I was blow away by the statistics she presented. That lead to Betty Friedan, Naomi Wolfe and through the years everything from Pink Think to Manifesta. I grew up in a small town in Texas where a higher premium was placed on being pretty than being smart. It always bothered me and it was nice to find a world of women acknowledging the distance between the value of men and women.
I agree with and support the dictionary definition of what a feminist is: a person who believes in equal rights for women economically, socially, and politically. It’s pretty simple and I don’t understand how anyone could not identify as a feminist. Being a feminist and a woman informs everything I do.
You use the word “girl” in your title and relate your childhood and teenage years to your professional and personal experiences as an adult. How do you define the word “girl” and how are you using it in your title?
To me, girl is a noun identifying a female. I am using it a little bit mockingly, and a little bit lovingly, in the title of this book. When you think of a record collector, stereotypically, the image that will be used in pop culture is like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World. And a music snob would be Jack Black in High Fidelity. I can’t think of a single image of a female record collector as an archetype, because it’s not seen as a female domain. And I think that’s dumb, because we all know female music enthusiasts, collectors, and fetishists. They’re no more few and far between than the male variety. With that stereotypical archetype in mind, I think it’s a funny bordering on absurd to attach “for girls” to it.
At the same time, I’m pretty fascinated by the “for girls” culture. It’s empowering when you’re The Golden Girls, because older women owning that term and referring to themselves in whatever manner they choose is endearing. And it’s unacceptable to some people when it’s “the girls’ guide to…” because they see the pink ghetto. I’m well aware that music books, even those written by women, are rarely marketed to women. If we buy them it’s a bonus but men are the target audience. Putting “for girls” in the title forces it to be a music book marketed to women. And in the end that was very important to me.
What’s the first album you received and did it influence you in any way?
I honestly couldn’t say what the first album I received was, but the first one I saved up my allowance to buy was Julian Lennon’s Valotte in 1985. It was interesting because vinyl was on the decline culturally and as a kid it was a lot more economically viable to buy cassettes and even more so to tape songs off of the radio. Julian didn’t have a huge influence on me, but the first time I played Bananarama for my mother and she told me it was horrible did — it was the first time I realized that all music was not created equal. Up to that point I’d listened mainly to my parents’ record collection and lived in a world where everything was good. But when I started to like my own music, the pop music of the era, and was told it wasn’t good, it made me start to think about how people picked the music they liked and what made it good or bad. I still think about that all the time.
The book focuses a lot on your romantic relationships with men and connects it to your music fandom. How do you engage in music fandom with women? Are there fundamental differences between how you engage with music with men and women?
In my experience, women are less likely to wear their opinions about music on their sleeves. You hardly have to mention something to a guy and he’ll immediately spill everything he thinks about an artist like he’s been forming these opinions for years, even on things he barely cares about, along with as many statistics and bits of useless information as he’s been able to memorize. This confidence in talking about music isn’t always present with women. It’s often more of a question, a conversation and less of a factual history about the band.
Something happened recently where a guy friend asked me to send him some hate-filled songs because he was ramping up to take someone down at work. The way he talked about it was bordering on violent and he has a physical stature that I don’t. He could beat someone up while I could not. I found that informing what sort of songs I put on this mix for him. I edited out a lot of songs I’d put on angry revenge mixes for myself. If I made that playlist for a woman, it wouldn’t be the same at all. But, at the same time, if the guy who’d asked me to make him a playlist to get amped up were a physical weakling, it would have been different as well. In the end the fundamental differences depend very much on the individual person.
The Beatles vs. Stones essay in my book is a direct response to the debates I have with my friend Marisa. She loves the Stones and I love the Beatles. I am forever coming up with arguments to stop her cold or trip her arguments up. I want to tackle it from every angle and make her admit I’m right, because that’s how we talk to each other. I wouldn’t have that conversation in the same way with a more sensitive person, whatever their gender.
Since a lot of the book focuses on ex-boyfriends, you might open yourself up to criticism that you’re really just writing about boys. Do you think this is sexist? If so, how would you counter that critique?
If we can agree that Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and both of Sheffield’s books are sexist because they use romantic relationships as storytelling devices to get at a universal idea, then I’ll agree that me writing about boys is sexist. If not, then I think there’s a double standard at work in that idea.
In addition to comparisons between Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield’s more personal writings on music, your book follows Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, Sara Marcus’ Girls to the Front: The True Story of Riot Grrrl Revolution, Kristin Hersh’s Rat Girl, and Out of the Vinyl Deeps, a collection of Ellen Willis. Apart from crudely lumping you together as cisgender white ladies, you all tend to focus extensively on memoir with rock music as the predominant genre of analysis. Do you put yourself in that context or do you see yourself apart from it? Also, how do you conceptualize race, whiteness, and sexuality in relation to gender in your work and with this book?
I think that’s a fair comparison, although my book is a lot more editorially driven than the ladies you’ve listed here, save Kristin Hersh whose book is a straight memoir. I think Ellen Willis is much more in the vein of music criticism and Marisa Meltzer is music history, both with touches of personal anecdote. My book is really light on criticism, because I don’t fancy myself a music critic, and a mishmash of memoir and history with a dash of how-to for the less musically aggressive.
This book is based on my own world view, however. To expect it to address race and sexuality outside of my experience would be to ask it to be disingenuous. By way of an example: there is a lot to say about female superfans, especially as it relates to boy bands and teenage girls. I think there are tons of fascinating social dynamics at play there but I didn’t write about it because it was never my experience. I don’t relate to Beatlemania. I didn’t have a favorite New Kid. I thought the Backstreet Boys were creepy. They’ve all been in my life, but it’s nothing I felt like I had enough experience and position to take on.
The most poignant part of the book for me was when you talked about going to a music store as a kid and the instrument salesman assuming you were buying a clarinet when you wanted to play drums. As someone who picked up a guitar last year and teaches music history workshops for Girls Rock Camp, I can certainly relate. Do you hope this book is a resource for young girls? If so, what do you hope they get out of it? What do you think of organizations like Girls Rock Camp? Do you think they are an effective way to get girls involved in music?
I absolutely do not think young girls should read this book. Teenagers, sure. I think it has YA appeal and I think putting history in context is important or else you have no understanding of how you earned the rights you have today or what still needs work and attention. I’m a big fan of things like Girls Rock Camp and providing role models for girls that show them girls can play music.
The problem for me is that I get stuck on how I felt growing up. Again, small town in Texas. There weren’t resources like Girls Rock Camp readily available. For me, getting to play drums felt like a fight. I had to fight with the boy who was the leader of the drum line the entire time I did it just to prove myself. So did the one other girl who played drums in my grade. And I stopped my junior year in high school because I got tired of fighting. It was so much work to feel like you were constantly bucking tradition and never good enough, with no support system in sight. I think it’s important to have icons in pop culture, for those girls who don’t live in cities or have progressive parents, who normalize the idea of girls doing whatever they want to do — be it professional musician, comedienne, writer, whatever. And to reinforce ALL THE TIME that it’s an achievable aspiration.
You also discuss the dearth of all-female bands in our contemporary moment. What do you think of Beyoncé touring with an all-female band? Conversely, how do you feel about mixed-gender bands?
I think very few people notice who Beyoncé’s backing band are. The casual observer probably doesn’t and the shows are so 100% about Beyoncé. I’m glad she’s doing it, but until it starts getting discussed in Us Weekly and on Entertainment Tonight, I’m not sure how much of an impact it’s making in the wider pop culture sense.
I had a friend who, when his band was looking for a new keyboardist, wouldn’t audition any girls because he thought it was too hard to take a girl on the road. In his mind there was too much of a chance that someone would try to sleep with the girl and it would cause tension. Women are still subject to the sexual whims of men, in the sense that it gives them a reason to not consider us equals. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean they’ll always let you, including in music. I think there’s a difference in mixed gender bands that are founded by women and those founded by men. I think that behavior is a lot more scarce when women are running the show and setting the boundaries.
Who are some of your favorite female instrumentalists and vocalists and why? What kinds of vocal styles and performance styles most resonate with you?
I’ve always really liked Bonnie Raitt and Melissa auf der Meyer’s guitar playing. You can’t deny Merrill from tUnE-yArDs and Kaki King as drummers/percussionists but obviously I think Janet Weiss is one of the best female drummers ever. In the world of jazz piano I like Blossom Dearie, Shirley Horn, and Nina Simone. In pop I like Kate Bush and Christine McVie. Imogen Heap creates some interesting soundscapes too. There are certainly a lot of well-known female bassists, but it’s hard to call out any as favorites. I think bass is one of those instruments that needs a whole band around it to be interesting most of the time. I think the vocalists and styles that resonate with me are like anyone: they’re the ones you can personally relate to, that make you feel something. I feel like I might listen to lyrics more than most people and makes me want to designate songs to occasions.
You come to this project from a professional experience in the mainstream music industry, ostensibly bringing fringe or indie artists into the mainstream. What do you think the current generation of artists relationship is to mainstream success? How are female artists conceptualizing this, in your experience?
From 2000 to 2010 the idea that indie bands needed to sign to a major label to have mainstream success seems to have disappeared. I think Death Cab were the last of the indie bands who felt they had to do that. It’s partly because major labels are shrinking but also because indie labels are growing. The playing field seems a bit more level so a band like Vampire Weekend can choose to sign to XL Records instead of a major label, stay in a world of people they actually like while marketing their records, have greater control over how they’re marketed, and achieve the level of mainstream success they’re comfortable with. Just a few years ago bands like TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs felt they had to move on from indies to majors to be successful and make enough money to survive.
From what I can see, in indie culture female musicians and bands are less likely to go for mainstream success. I don’t blame them either, because it involves a lot of compromise or an obnoxiously strong will to be a pop star and stay true to yourself. It’s hard work and you’re under appreciated. It’s a lot easier to stay in the world you’re comfortable with.
As a music industry professional, how do you think the industry has changed for women, if in fact it has? Do you consider the wave of prominent female music supervisors like Alexandra Patsavas to be a positive change? What future are we passing on to the next generation of industry professionals?
I think it’s a lot more important that there be more female artist managers, A&R people, marketers, producers and programmers than music supervisors. Ultimately the choices in music placement for film and TV lies with the director, so it’s a more important to have more female film and TV directors than music supervisors.
And music supervisors also can’t do much unless there are female A&R execs signing more female bands and working with their managers to make sure their marketing budgets are the same as their male contemporaries. And you need women in business positions, heading up labels and their marketing departments, who are cognizant of how they treat and market female artists.
As someone who worked for MTV as a music programmer, what did you think of this year’s VMAs? What performances and artists resonated most with you? Also, what do you think of Odd Future’s recent cultural ascendancy?
I thought that Britney tribute was weird. And the Amy Winehouse tribute could have been better — just one song, sung by Bruno Mars, really? Beyoncé and Adele killed it. I get the spectacle factor with Chris Brown, but I wish they’d stop asking him back. I don’t get the spectacle with Jay-Z and Kanye, they’re just rapping about rich people problems now. Every show that lacks a host tends to feel a bit disjointed. I felt like I didn’t know when the show was going to be over this year.
Odd Future reminds me the ascendancy of CA hardcore after punk: a bunch of young dudes with little life experience shooting off the big mouth.
Finally, I was pleased to be interviewing a fellow Texan (I’m from Houston). To close, what playlist would you put together for people who need exposure to our home state’s rich musical history?
Some important ones to know:
Buddy Holly “That’ll Be The Day” — obviously one of the greats in the history of rock ‘n roll, from the little town of Lubbock.
Blind Lemon Jefferson “Black Snake Moan” — one of the first commercially successful blues musicians and the greatest country blues musicians, he’s most closely associated with Dallas but lived all over Texas.
Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys “Cotton Eyed Joe” — when you think of traditional country music, you probably think of Bob Willis. But also Ernest Tubb, Gene Autry, and Lefty Frizzell, in their respective niches of country, were respectable Texans who defined the genre.
Ornette Coleman “Congeniality” – one of the jazz greats who traveled all over the world but hailed from Ft. Worth. His The Shape of Jazz to Come is a must-own.
Willie Nelson “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” — Willie grew up that funny part of central-verging-on-west Texas that was heavy in Czech and German influence. I like to think it informed his view as an outsider in country music. This song in particular is one we all had to learn and sing at my kindergarten graduation ceremony.
Josh T. Pearson “Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ” — I knew the guys in Lift to Experience from going to shows and house parties in Denton while I was in college. They were amazing and under appreciated in the US at the time and that appears to still be the case with Pearson’s solo album some 10+ years later. It’s amazing.
Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” — Houston has an ever-fluctuating hip hop scene. The whole Fifth Ward lifestyle is so foreign to me, I didn’t realize what paranoid, crazy gold this song is until years later.
Erykah Badu “Tyrone” — A classic track from possibly the most innovative soul singer to come out of Texas. But she’s more than just a soul singer. She’s a rebel through and through — and that’s a bit of her Texas spirit, even though she might be an enigma to most native Texans.
Beyoncé “Crazy In Love” and Solange “Sandcastle Disco” — Yes, the Knowles girls are also from Houston. I don’t know that it influences their music anymore, but it’s hard to shake your Texas roots completely.
Tripping Daisy “Sonic Bloom” — This band was the precursor to the Polyphonic Spree. While the latter creeps me out, Tripping Daisy were the gateway drug into the north Texas and Oklahoma psych rock scene of the ‘90s that included the Flaming Lips, Mazinga Phaser, and Captain Audio (the precursor to the Secret Machines). Obviously a lot of what these guys did was related to the belated reverence the ‘90s started placing on the original TX psych rock band, the 13th Floor Elevators, but quite a bit was influenced by Texas Anglophilia for bands like Spiritualized and My Bloody Valentine.
Janis Joplin “Me & Bobby McGee” — She might seem like a flower child owned by San Francisco but Joplin is from the shithole east Texas town of Port Authur, known for it’s oil rigs and nothing much else. It made her a tough girl.
Pantera “A New Level of Power” — one of the greatest heavy metal bands in the world came out of Arlington, home of the Six Flags theme park and the Texas Rangers baseball team. It’s not my thing, but it speaks volumes about how the boredom of growing up in a cement suburban wasteland can be parlayed into music.
Phil Ochs “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and George Jones “She Thinks I Still Care” — Ochs’ history on its own is very interesting and tragic, but more so to me is how he marks the division between country and folk. In the ‘40s hillbilly music was a part of the folk genre, by classification. But after McCarthyism hit in the ‘50s, the music industry needed to separate hillbilly and cowboy songs so they didn’t seem red — and the term country was born. Ochs is markedly folk, in the sense that he became a protest singer who you could compare to Dylan. He came from the same time as George Jones, a well-known Texas country star who couldn’t be more different. In the ‘30s there was no separating Woody Guthrie’s identities as a folk singer and a hillbilly. It’s remarkable how far apart folk and country grew in just a decade and Ochs is the personification of that divide in Texas.
Kelly Clarkson “Since U Been Gone” — worth noting that the first winner of the cultural juggernaut American Idol is a Texan.
George Strait “All My Exes Live In Texas” — whether you like country or you don’t, you know George if you’re from Texas. He’s a state hero and one of the main faces of the neoclassical country music movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s. He’s a big part of the reason cowboys dress up in pearl button down shirts, nice felt hats and tight pants.
Miranda Lambert “Only Prettier” — Lambert is picking up the reigns where Loretta Lynn left off. She’s one of the roughest and most interesting country artists out today and, being from a small town in Texas herself, does a great job at capturing that feeling in her songs.
